Donald L. Bryant Jr., a vineyard owner who built up a star-studded art collection filled with key works by Americans and Germans, died on March 1 at 82. His passing was announced by his vineyard, the Bryant Family Estate, on March 3.
Bryant spun the wealth into a sizable collection that included great—and often very expensive—works. The list of artists behind those artists counts many of the most celebrated painters of the 20th century, among them Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Gober, and Willem de Kooning.
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More recently, an array of disputes, some waged within courts and others within the press, have cast a pall over this collection. Works from his holdings have occasionally headed to auction, including a Picasso painting made in 1932, the most valuable year of the artist’s career on the market, that sold at Sotheby’s for $11 million in 2023.
He appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list more than a dozen times, sometimes alongside his third wife, Bettina Bryant, with whom he had three children.
Born in 1942 in Mount Vernon, Illinois, Bryant initially began by founding a wealth management firm in St. Louis before launching the Bryant Group, an insurance firm. By this point, he was already a millionaire, and he had espoused a personal motto: “Think big. Talk big. Do big.”
With his first wife, Barbara, he purchased his winery in Napa, California, and while there were initially some financial hurdles, the vinery became a success, thanks to the hiring of cult winemaker Helen Turley during the ’90s. Today, the vinery is known for its Cabernets.
While some collectors undertake their passion from a young age, Bryant only began pursuing it aggressively when he was in his 50s. In 1993, while on sabbatical, he relocated to London with his family and started studying up on art. Under the guidance of a Tate consultant (who went unnamed in the various profiles of the businessman), Bryant visited 47 European museums—the Wall Street Journal cited that exact number—and built up a working knowledge of modern and contemporary art.
He began by buying a Pierre Bonnard painting as a gift to his second wife, Barbara Murphy, and went on to snap up a de Kooning painting. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that the painting, a 1948 canvas called Mailbox, was bought for $3.7 million and “could arguably resell for $45 million today.” When Bryant began showing off his art in 2009 in a freshly renovated 4,000-square-foot duplex in New York, Mailbox was hung above a fireplace. “There is everything in this thing, but it’s all revolved around sex,” Bryant told the Journal in 2009.
Bryant was an avid supporter of institutions, funding the Tate museum network during the ’90s and sitting on the boards of the St. Louis Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, there’s even an entire gallery named after Bryant at MoMA.
His dealings with MoMA periodically drew scrutiny. In 2013, collectors and MoMA trustees Henry Kravis and his wife, Marie-Josée, sued Bryant, claiming that he had held three Jasper Johns paintings “hostage” when he made attempts to keep them from heading to MoMA. Bryant denied this, and the parties agreed to resolve the claims several months later. (On the museum’s website, all three of those works are currently listed as promised gifts from the Kravises and Bryant.)
Bryant was a MoMA trustee until 2011, the year after he retired from the Bryant Group, though the museum has never officially stated why he left the board. According to a Wall Street Journal report from 2019 that cited two family members and one former MoMA trustee, Bryant had made antisemitic comments at a party.
The Journal story was focused on the legal and financial woes that beset Bryant, who was battling Alzheimer’s. The article, written by Kelly Crow, described one instance in which Bryant bought a $37 million Richter painting at auction—even though he didn’t have the money to pay for it. Crow reported that, at the time, the Bryant family had taken out $90 million in art-backed loans.
In interviews, it was clear that his love for art counted for him as one of his longest relationships. “You date it, you put it up then you put it in a basement for a couple of years,” he once said. “I have a relationship with the art.”